Yellow Submarines and Operational Closure

A lot of people have been perplexed by the idea of operational closure I discussed in a previous post and why it entails that there is no direct transformations of information between systems or objects. Maturana and Varela give a nice analogy that might shed some light for some on this concept. As they write,

Perhaps an analogy will clarify [the concept of operational closure]. Imagine a person who has always lived in a submarine. He has never left it and has been trained how to handle it. Now, we are standing on the shore and see the submarine gracefully surfacing. We then get on the radio and tell the navigator inside: “Congratulations! You have avoided the reefs and surfaced beautifully. You really know how to handle a submarine.” The navigator in the submarine, however, is perplexed: “What’s this about reefs and surfacing? All I did was push some levers and turn knobs and make certain relationships between indicators as I operated the levers and knobs. It was all done in a prescribed sequence which I’m used to. I didn’t do any special maneuver, and on top of that, you talk to me about a submarine. You must be kidding!”

All that exists for the man inside the submarine are indicator readings, their transitions, and ways of obtaining specific relations between them. It is only for us on the outside, who see how relations change between the submarine and its environment, that the submarine’s behavior exists and that it appears more or less adequate according to the consequences. If we are to maintain logical accounting, we must not confuse the operations of the submarine itself and its dynamics of different states with its movements and changing position in the environment. (The Tree of Knowledge, 136 – 137)

This is operational closure. For us, the observer, there appears to be a correlation between the movements of the submarine and the reefs in the environment. For the submariner, by contrast, there is no submarine nor any reefs, there are only the events that show up on the submariners dials and instruments and the operations that he carries out on his levers. Take the submariner out of the picture– he’s too much of a homunculus –and leave just the operations and the instruments and you have an operationally closed system.

read on!
When I say that operations within an object only refer to other operations in the system, the point is that they only refer to– following the analogy –the read outs on the “instruments” and the operations that follow from these events on the instruments. The pings on a sonar are nothing like the coral reef that exists in the environment of the system. The operations that follow from those pings (turn left, pull up, push down, etc) are nothing like that reef. Clearly something outside the submarine is stimulating or trigger these instruments, but it is nothing like what takes place on these instruments. Drawing on Graham’s schema, sensual objects are never like the real objects that trigger them and sensual objects exist only on the interior of another real object; in this case the submarine is the real object and the events on the instruments are the sensual objects that exist on the interior of the real object (cf. Harman here and here). The sensual object (event on the instrument) is always a caricature of the real object that stimulated it (the reef). For an example of what I’m getting at here see my remark on biological experiments with frogs here.

This is how it is with all objects. They only refer to themselves or their own internal world and never directly to the stimuli that might trigger events within them. It is for this reason that information cannot be exchanged between objects. The concept of traditional concept of information treats information as something that remains the same that is exchanged between two systems like a dollar bill might be passed on to another person. In the classical semiotic model there is a self-identical message transferred from one person to another in a medium (air for example) across a channel (sound) that is then decoded according to a shared code.

Within the framework of operational closure, however, this can’t work as objects are never able to get outside themselves to get at the world apart from them. Like our submariner, they have only their internal world to go on. Communication isn’t possible because there is a shared code, but rather communication is an accomplishment that emerges over the course of many failed communications between two structurally coupled operational systems. The meaning is not there at the outset in the form of a shared code, but is rather a result that unfolds as a result of a great deal of mutual “tuning” between the two coupled systems (and even then the meaning is never quite the same between the two participants; rather it’s close enough to allow each system or object to “steer the reef” of the other system). This is why Lacanian practice takes the form it does. Because both analysand and analyst are operationally closed systems the analyst conducts himself with respect to the analysand in such a way that he might gradually come to realize that what he takes to be the intentions of other persons are but his readings on his instruments. Discovering that he does not truly know the desires and intentions of others the analysand can begin to imagine other possible intentions and separate himself from paralyzing beliefs as to what others want from him. Analysis does not lead us to knowledge– well it leads us to knowledge of our own instruments, but not of others –but leads us to an encounter with our own ignorance: that we do not know what others desire. That’s what traversing the fantasy is all about.

If social systems are objects as I’ve been at pains to argue, then it follows that social systems are operationally closed as well. This means that people belong to the environment of social systems just as the reef belongs to the environment of the submarine. People are outside social systems. As I’ve remarked elsewhere, I find this thought absolutely horrifying because it entails that the way social systems register us and the operations that follow from that registration are nothing like our intentions and desires and sense of self-identity. Just as the ping of sonar is nothing like the whale out there, the manner in which a social system would register us would be nothing like us. A friend of mine had an experience like this back in graduate school when Loyola hosted SPEP a decade back. People would come up to him to be signed in for the conference and would freak out if he didn’t have the information there on the sheet. “What do you mean I’m not listed there? You must know that I’ve paid in advance!” From the standpoint of the social system (the SPEP conference apparatus) he had been reduced to a role that must therefore have transparent knowledge of the functioning of the entire system. In my view, Franz Kafka is the great explorer of this non-relation between social systems and persons in The Trial and The Castle. The judicial system and the Castle respectively “count” Joseph K. (i.e., register him on their “instruments”) in a particular way that entails all sorts of further operations within those objects, but how he’s been counted and what those operations might be are entirely opaque to him. He’s become entangled in these systems, but nonetheless only exists in the environment of these systems.

To make matters worse, systems do not even register all things that take place within their environment. Our submarine can be perturbed in two ways: through sonar and sound. It can’t be perturbed by electro-magnetic or visual stimuli. As such, these types of stimuli don’t even exist for it. Likewise, social systems are unable to register all sorts of phenomena because they don’t fall anywhere in the range of its channels or distinctions. This is the case with climate change with regard to a number of social systems. Due to the temporal and geographical structuration of these systems the changes that are taking place in these systems are too small and gradual to be registered and operated on. As a consequence, climate change continues apace eating away at the milieu these systems rely on to continue their existence. At a certain point a breaking point will be reached and the changes will become too great for these systems to sustain themselves.

Operational closure is not a happy thought. It presents us with a world in which we’re entangled with all sorts of entities that we can hardly communicate with yet which nonetheless influence our lives in all sorts of ways. One key political question is the question of how we can engage these systems to either destroy them or modify them so as to advance our own welfare.

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19 Responses to “Yellow Submarines and Operational Closure”

Another interesting post. At the risk committing the crime of self-promotion,(which is a joke for me, being so marginalised anyway), there is a useful summary of ‘autopoeisis and languaging’ in my little thesis ‘The Primacy of Semiosis’ which Levi kindly cites in Dem of Objects.
I did attempt to present the idea of operational closure in an accessible way…I dislike unnecessarily complicated language. Massumi, Alliez, and Boundas seemed to like it…Anyway that’s enuf from me – thanks for indulging.

Not to be acutely reductionist about all of this, but doesn’t operational close logically follow from finitude? I know it’s much, much more complicated than that, but if you accept finitude, than this idea isn’t that hard to understand, or at least it shouldn’t be. Just my two cents…

So what abut tiers of (mis)communication or provocation — isn’t there a degree to which one can NEAR an accurate external reality even though the system is closed? If the submarine’s closed system, for example, began using its sonar in the manner of scientific research — bombaring something that was a sonar blip from multiple angles multiple times and then computing it into a 3-dimensional image or something — thus adding to the closed system’s sensory apparatus, but not in a blind way (as in evolution).

How does science then operate when we’re dealing with closed systems? And what would be a definition (or maybe there wouldn’t be one?) of objective truth?

I articulate elements of my theory of knowledge in the first chapter of The Democracy of Objects. You can find further discussion in my interview with Fractured Politics (link in side bar). Certainly the relationship between the submarine’s instruments ajd the reef is not random or arbitrary.

Why do we have to imagine humans to exist alongside of society rather than as part of its “inner molten core”? If, as Harman suggests, objects exhibit a nested architecture than shouldn’t we imagine humans, among countless other objects, to form the sensual objects of its interior? It’s environment would then consist of “larger” objects that unfold at a slower speed relative to its own metabolism such as global markets or free-trade zones.

But does being withdrawn and independent require objects be non-nested? Are the cells in the submarine operator’s body objects? Can’t objects be on the inside of each other and still feel themselves to be oppressed? And how are we to interpret Harman’s claim that objects are nested if not by imagining them to be part of on internal infinite regress? Very much appreciate your responding to this issue as it’s really been bugging me.

Objects are composed of other objects but are nonetheless withdrawn and independent. I’ve written quite a bit on this. You can do a blog search under “mereology” or read chapter 5 of TDO for more. With human beings a social system constitutes persons as elements. Their status as an element differs from their being as a person and constrains their communicative possibilities.

This is way off topic and I’m so sorry for straying, but I wanted to ask a basic question. I’ve been reading Badiou’s book on Wittgenstein, “Wittgenstein’s Anti-Philosophy.” In the intro, the translator makes a point of discussing how psychoanalysts’ and philosophers (especially Continental) have been “pleading guilty,” or marginalizing themselves in the face of an empirical, symptomatic modernity. He also makes a series of claims about Lacan’s antipathy to philosophy. Was Lacan so openly hostile? I thought you would know, since you’ve worked in the Lacanian tradition. I’m far less familiar with him then I should be because he’s a little difficult and I never know where to start, unless I just read ”Ecrits” cover to cover.

To keep my comment on topic, I think the mereological controversy only arises when one holds that objects are intrinsically related to the rest of reality. For me, it’s a matter of reductionism. Objects are irreducible to their constituent elements, but the elements are nonetheless real objects. I encounter my cell phone as a cell phone, not as, say, a fusion of various types of metal and plastic, plus cobalt and electronic signals. This helps me understand how no interaction exhausts the potential of an object, since my encounter of the metal’s properties as manifested in the functioning of my cell phone does not exhaust the possible relations of metal, which interacts with a plurality of stimuli, internally and externally, at any given point in time. I like the example of a cell phone, since they often do things they seem counter to our usage, like they have a “mind,” or agency, of their own. Turns out they do!

@ Stanley – I’m only about 20 pages into the intro. Reading it for class. Enjoying it so far, but I feel a little lost in places because I haven’t read a lot of Badiou. So I can’t speak to potential comparison with the rest of his works. Kris, if you’re reading this, maybe you can help?

Lacan’s fundamental teaching is the idea of incompleteness and the impossibility of forming any sort of totality or complete system. He sees philosophy as the opposite. In his earlier teachings he characterizes philosophy as a “paranoid” discourse because it attempts to form a complete totality where everything has an assigned place and can be traced back to some sort of fundamental principle (force, Platonic forms, mind, etc). Paranoia is a way of thinking in which the paranoid person has a complete understanding of all that occurs in the world (this is what a conspiracy theory is). Much philosophy very much fits this model. Consider, for example, Hegel’s system that claims totality and completeness or the way in which some Marxists ground everything in economics. With that said, profound and informed discussions of philosophy can be found throughout all of Lacan’s writings. His anti-philosophy is not a hatred philosophy, but is rather very much in the vein of the Socratic dictum “all I know is that I know nothing”. Lacan sees philosophy as a refusal to acknowledge this non-knowledge and incompleteness. In my view– and I think Badiou’s is similar –Lacan’s challenging anti-philosophy does not entail the abandonment of philosophy, but rather a new type of philosophy that strives to take incompleteness into account. I believe this is accomplished through both withdrawn objects and the way in which I’ve deployed Lacan’s graphs of sexuation in the final chapter of The Democracy of Objects.

The trouble with this theory is in explaining how an observer sees anything at all!!! How she has ‘intonations’, or phenomenal experience of an object world. Whether of instruments or waves.

For Mat it’s like hey presto – when languaging arises with 2nd order recursions in coordinations of acts, the ‘observer’ arises. It’s almost laughable.

In fact there may be no ‘explanation’ or mechanism. Other than the fact that natural science finds observers and psyches in nature as givens. That certain causal chains end in an observer (or rather psyche) seeing something, rather than being a zombie, is a fact of life. And no-one today has provided an ‘explanation’ that is accepted.

Badiou’s book is a fine buy, if you can spare the change. While I don’t agree with everything in it, it’s an interesting engagement with and critique of Wittgenstein’s ideas. A third of the book is the translator’s (Bruno Bosteels) intro, which can easily be misread as overly negationist, if you’re unfamiliar with Lacan and Badiou. I don’t think the line between anti-philosophy and psychoanalytic insight, on the one hand, and the philosophical pursuit of articulable truths, on the other, is as divisive as Bosteels sometimes asserts, but his point, and Badiou’s I think, is to elucidate how anti-philosophy (and sophistry, to an extent) complements ‘traditional’ philosophy, and provides a rupture – or series of ruptures – from which Badiou’s own thought emerges and become sensible. Does it recapitulate extant Badiouan themes? Sure, but it’s thought-provoking. If you’re short on cash, however, you’d be better served by saving $25 for the print version of Levi’s book. Shameless plug. ;)

[…] us but they are completely alien to us (in the Bogostian sense). They are operationally closed. Operational Closure means that things may work in ways that are not at all obvious to us, neither at first nor after we […]